Claire Burbridge, Nucleus, 2021, watercolor, pen, and ink on Arches paper, 42.5 x 42.5 inches

EXHIBITION DATES
May 5 to June 30, 2021 

NANCY TOOMEY FINE ART
1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco

VIRTUAL TOUR

 

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Claire Burbridge titled Here and in Between, on view from May 5 to June 30, 2021. The gallery is located inside San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street. Gallery hours, for now, are Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, 12pm to 4pm, and by appointment–please contact nancy@nancytoomeyfineart.com or 415-307-9038.

The public is invited to meet artist Claire Burbridge at the gallery this Saturday, May 8, from 2pm to 5pm.

Claire Burbridge, The Nocturnal Life of Trees, 2020, pen and ink on Arches paper, 96.5 x 49.5 inches

Formally trained at the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University, Claire Burbridge creates drawings that are not strictly botanical illustrations, but depict evolving universes of complex, sometimes imaginary, ecosystems. Rendered with extreme detail, they have a sense of both reality and the fantastical. Exhibiting the exuberance of growth, as well as its inevitable companion—death and decay—the works explore the conscious and unconscious, light and dark, and give form to the formless. The very process of life seems to flourish and play out before our eyes, displaying her remarkably lush, detailed compositions to full effect.

Claire Burbridge, Sirens 2, 2021, pen and ink on Arches paper, 32.5 x 43.5 inches

London-born Burbridge, now located in Ashland, Oregon, chose the exhibition title Here and in Between to reflect her way of working. Spending months immersed in one drawing at a time, a piece takes shape and comprises a complete world, a fully conceived creation evolved to its most detailed possible manifestation. Burbridge describes finishing a drawing as “going into a place that is in between worlds, a state of being-ness and latent form.” Primarily rendered in pen and ink on archival paper, her current body of work consists of marks, dots, and dashes that provide a matrix to organize the chaos of nature into cohesive form.

Claire Burbridge, Prospero, 2019, pen and ink on Arches paper, 12.25 x 9.75 inches

The title of the exhibition also refers to a small selection of pieces that would normally be hidden away, but will be shown in tandem with the highly finished, definitive works that form the heart of the show. Each of these drawings, which she considers were born from the in between, hold elements of the more highly conceived work. Complete works in their own right, they articulate what Burbridge wanted to say in the language of intelligent observation. They provide a way to listen into a realm less dense than that of visible forms.

Claire Burbridge, The Five Elements, 2020, pigment pencils, graphite, pen and ink on Arches paper, 48.5 x 48.5 inches

The technical precision and intricate detail of each piece invites the viewer to look more closely, magnifying the intelligent order and spontaneous beauty that make up the natural world. The observer is offered the opportunity to use their capacity of feeling rather than intellect to more deeply connect with, decipher, and, above all, enjoy a place more liminal, free of control, and full of expansion and possibility.

Claire Burbridge, photo by Joby Talbot

Claire Burbridge currently lives and works in Ashland, Oregon. Burbridge was born in London in 1971, and gained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Art and the History of Art at Magdalen College Oxford and the Ruskin school of Fine Art in 1993. After completing a master’s in Fine Art printmaking at Camberwell College of Art and Design, she lived and worked as a practicing artist in London until 2010 when she relocated to southern Oregon. Her work is included in many private and public collections worldwide, notably the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Fidelity Bank Collection in Cincinnati. After her 2020 solo exhibition Pathways to the Invisible at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, she was commissioned by the Oregon Arts Commission to do a large series of works, now permanently installed at Western Oregon University’s Natural Sciences building.

Here and in Between is Claire Burbridge’s fifth solo show at Nancy Toomey Fine Art in San Francisco.